


expatriation

by gentlecoyote



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, i haven't touched ao3 in ten million years..., take my offering of existential suffering. no questions pls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 05:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11822520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlecoyote/pseuds/gentlecoyote
Summary: in which the reader remembers her time before the blackwagon with unusual clarity, given her state of disarray at the time. she also remembers her first meeting with the nightwings, that day in the desert.(covers prison/trial/first days of exile for my reader, zaïre!)





	expatriation

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: i have many many more thoughts and headcanons for pyre, but i'm very attached to my reader and kind of wanted to get the entire exiling process off my chest first.
> 
> ALSO: i forgot ao3 was a pain to format - check the [original posting](http://eyeb0t.tumblr.com/post/164263148342/expatriation-in-which-the-reader-remembers-her) of this work on my tumblr to get the formatting, sry for my incapability to use ao3 properly dlkfjslkjdjk

Dying in the Downside seemed to be a grand, cosmic joke at this point.

Not that Zaïre could laugh, of course. Spending the better part of a week face-down in the arid dunes beyond the River’s termination pool had a way of drying one’s throat. Even thinking about the water she’d left behind - as undrinkable as it was - made her lick her dry lips with her equally dry tongue in sorrowful remembrance.

At least in her jail cell, she’d had water. Granted, she had to lick it off the moss that covered the walls every night, but that was better than nothing. She missed that moss.

Well, she hoped it had been moss.

Regardless, the jail had been luxurious compared to her current accommodations, at least as far as amenities were concerned. It was pitch-dark, consistently damp, and oftentimes so cold at night that she shivered in her thin robes, but she’d had water - even food. Thin gruel only came around every… well, she didn’t know. It was hard to count time down there. But half a bowl of the tasteless, liquidy wheat mash only came when a guard remembered her existence, which she assumed - based on her present state - was rare.

Zaïre had had plenty of time to consider her crimes in that cell - along with her increasingly prominent rib bones. She spent most of her time introspecting, fingers curling in the increasingly nasty fabric hung around her frame. Occasionally she banged on the cell door; no one ever answered, and these futile attempts gave way to pacing, then sitting quietly against the dank wall she licked condensation off of.

For a time, she told herself all the stories she knew, but even that well went dry.

Eventually, she fell to complete mental silence - reclining with eyes closed in her tattered, filthy robes. A striking finality that her fate could not be endured or avoided. Her trial would never come, she was certain, and she’d die down here in the dark - alone, starving.

If penance was the goal, she had almost been at her breaking point when the guards finally came to get her.

Light was painful, their indelicate handling of her weakened body moreso. She was thrown into a brisk, cold shower and told to make herself presentable for the court; she was given robes that sufficiently demonstrated the depth of her crimes. They were gray and brown, ugly and tattered. Unevenly woven from scratchy fibers, like an inexperienced apprentice from her guild would make. On the back, someone had taken the time to poorly embroider the Commonwealth’s symbol for one of their highest crimes: literacy. The ligeratus star, arrows pointing ever-so-emphatically downwards, towards her next stop.

If she made it that far.

\--

The trial was as brusquely short as her weeks spent alone in the dark were long - alienating, still terrifying, but this time in a gilded, wood-paneled room filled with jeering faces. The judge had worn the standard mask and pompous powdered wig, looming above the rest of the court on her dramatically tall pulpit.

“Perhaps your precious words will assist you in the land below,” the judge had sneered, her voice laced with contempt. Zaïre said nothing, continued staring down at the pattern on the wood-paneled floor. With no defense put forward to extend the dramatic surge in the room, the judge quickly passed her sentence for high crimes against the peace and order of the Commonwealth: exile.

The judgement was met with a roar of approval, and the new exile closed her eyes and tilted her chin up against the force of it.

The cart ride was uneventful beyond the attention the carriage itself attracted. The people knew that only those about to be cast into the River were paraded in these fine, open-air carts, their enclosed exile visible to all, and watching one go by was rare enough to be a spectacle. Some jeered, others watched in silence - no one interrupted the cart’s passing.

Movement had become a slow process due to the hunger, and the guards grew impatient, thinking she was attempting to avoid her fate, somehow. They dragged her to the closest cage and tipped her inside, latching the old metal behind her.

The traditional, ritualistic drop point into the River was a raised stone overhang a few miles upriver from the cage storage. That day, however, the guards shrugged at each other and rolled her down the bank and into the water with no pomp, no circumstance; she wasn’t even worth the few miles of effort it took to follow tradition.

The River was cold, even in the late spring heat. Zaïre gasped in a lungful of air only once before the movement of the rolling cage forced her underwater; the next time she took a breath, she was falling - down, down, into the Downside.

\--

Maybe she had been too harsh on the Downside in her earlier comparison to her cell, now that she thought about it.

There was a contrasting and grim humor to it all - making it to trial after weeks of dank, dark starvation, only to be thrown into a river in a heavy iron cage; making it from the River into the Downside only to have to deal with the impacts that would follow. And if she survived that, well…

She’d kicked her half-broken cage open with a significant chunk of her body’s remaining strength after the final landing, cradling her arm. It hurt immensely - much more than the consistent gnaw of her hunger, which abated in the face of the raw nausea of a broken limb and the other injuries - her face, for one, and the countless bruises speckled across her body.

The shallow pool at the termination of the River was heaped with hundreds - thousands - of cages like the one she’d just weakly flopped out of, and not all of them were vacant. The other inhabitants were dead, of course, but also considerably less fleshy than herself, picked clean by scavengers.

Zaïre looked down at the water she was standing in before realizing that it was water and dropping to her knees, frantically scooping a handful of it to her mouth with her good arm - only to immediately spit it out. Salt. The water was saltier than the ocean, and she finally noticed that it was an unnatural pinkish color, a detail her exhausted brain hadn’t caught before. Blood from her split lip dripped into her wavering reflection, distorting it even further.

She’d been tempted to keep drinking, but the flavor was revolting and the salt on her tongue made her feel sicker. Instead, she looked to the horizon, trying to see what lay beyond the pool. Sheer rock faces flanked the pool and the rocky clearing it laid in, and beyond that laid… nothing. Just vast dunes that spread away towards the horizon, neverending.

In that moment, kneeling in a pink pool and flanked by bones and salt and metal, she realized she was alone in this new world, and shed a few silent, stray tears that she couldn’t afford.

\--

The small, voracious creatures chased her away from the pool when night fell.

Perhaps they were the scavengers that had picked apart the other bodies she saw; she’d never seen beasts like them and didn’t want to stay and find out if they scavenged live bodies, too. Maybe they were attracted by the smell of blood - or maybe the smell of desperation. She was sure she reeked of both.

Zaïre moved slowly, each step taking an immense effort. As she made her way from the pool towards the dunes by starlight, the creatures followed. Some flew, while others waddled along the ground, but while their intent remained ambiguous, the speed at which they pursued her did not.

Fighting panic at being followed by what now seemed to be dozens of them, she picked up her pace to a light, limping trot, ignoring the pain that this invoked from every exhausted muscle in her body.

Gravel gave way to silty dirt, and then sand. Climbing the first dune took almost everything she had left, and she paused at the top, panting. The small creatures - bats? - seemed to lose interest upon the introduction of sand, and slowly retreated to the pool, now several hundred feet in the distance.

Spent, she let herself fall backwards onto the dune, wincing at the jostling of her arm. She’d done her best to splint it with fabric torn from her robes and a slim but rigid piece of metal she’d scavenged back at the pool, but it was a clumsy fix. Luckily, the break didn’t seem too severe, but in her state…

Ignoring that thought, Zaïre turned her eyes to the night sky. It looked different, somehow, than the sky in the Commonwealth - not surprising, perhaps, but still strange to experience. Some of the sign stars seemed abnormally large and bright in the Downside’s night sky, easy to find. She quickly located her own star, Geminian - it was the only one she knew how to easily find back home.

Sleep came, quickly and accidentally, and smothered her.

\--

The next few days were long. She woke to sun in her face, and walked all day until she could go no further. The sand never lessened, and going back seemed pointless - a choice between two deaths, and one required even more walking.

After the first day, however, she didn’t walk anymore. Her body was sluggish, slow to listen, and too weak to support her any longer. She picked a dune and sat behind it, trying to avoid the wind.

Most of the time she saw things that she knew weren’t there - water, food, old friends. A stack of her books, a hypnotizing spindle. A man she hated. Her favorite loom. Still, she couldn’t get up and couldn’t call out; she simply sat and watched distant mirages and phantom words crawl in front of her eyes before drifting away like smoke with the next gust of wind.

Death was the only thing left to wait for, but wasn’t it better this way? She was warm (too warm) and dry (too dry) - a far cry from her terrible, cramped, reeking cell - but she could breathe fresh air and see the stars when the sun set, as oddly large as they were. Surely this was a better way to go, at the end of it all - despite what she had suffered to get from a frying pan to a fire.

So she laid in the sand, face-down to keep the sun out and drifting in and out of consciousness, and waited.

\--

Zaïre felt the wagon coming before she saw it. The ground beneath her body rumbled with the distant movement of wheels, becoming a steady beat that grew louder with passing time.

Finally, she shifted her head so she could look at the approaching vehicle with one eye, unable to bear her curiosity any longer.

A large, wheeled cart with tall wooden sides and a tented, red top pulled to a stop a fair distance away, and three figures emerged from it a minute later. While they approached her, she blinked at the small plant that sat on the back of the wagon, suddenly in awe of its existence.

The tallest one began to speak - a woman’s voice, low and brusque - and her words slipped past Zaïre’s mind like water over a stone. The smallest replied smartly, and they continued on like that.

While they went back and forth, she drifted. With nothing much to focus on during the last few days besides heat, need, and pain, having to focus on voices now seemed a monumental task. The consistent fog that clouded her mind did not disappear with their sudden presence, and she wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t just another conjuring of her dying brain.

“Looks like she’s still breathing,” the one who hadn’t spoken yet said.

The large, masked woman made mention of sending her to a better place in reply, and Zaïre instinctively started at that. She shifted to extend her arm as best she could and weakly smacked the side of the woman’s… oh. That wasn’t a foot. It appeared to be a hoof - and now she knew she really was losing it. She flinched away from the strange limb after making contact, and the limb moved away from her in derisive turn.

“It seems she takes umbrage at the discussion of her murder.” That was the one who’d noticed she was alive still, and there was an edge of a smile in his voice.

The woman scoffed, but it came out more like the huff of a large animal.

“Wait,” the middle one said again. “Look, the robe… perhaps she’s one of them.”

“Bah, look at her,” the smallest interjected. “Shaking, starving, probably diseased. Good luck with that one!”

They traded a few more words before the woman shook her head (and huge, horn mask along with it) and disappeared into the wagon with the smallest one, leaving her with the figure most similarly shaped to herself. A man, based on his voice.

He was either going to kill her or… well, killing her seemed to be the leading plan, unless her brain was making all this up - she curled up into herself on defensive instinct as he approached, hands going to his mask.

The stranger pulled the mask off, letting the neighboring fabric fall back around his neck before tucking the mask in a sack at his side.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, and she hesitantly peeked over her shoulder at him.

Perhaps she wasn’t expecting a fellow exile and her possible executioner to be so young, but she saw a man not much older than she with dark red hair and a reassuring smile. Her eyes widened involuntarily - she’d gone a long time without seeing another person’s face - or even her own - and longer still since she saw anyone who wasn’t leering in contempt at her. It was impossible to tell much else about him due to the angle of the setting sun at his back, but he quickly stooped to her semi-prone form, kneeling in the sand.

“Hello, my friend,” he said, his Sahrian warm and a little scratchy. Zaïre strained to move her body, shifting only a few inches onto her side as he moved to wrap his arm around her back and lift her up off the hot sand. Upset by the contact, she feebly pressed one of her hands against his shoulder, trying to push him away.

“Don’t try to talk.” His arm stabilized her; her weak attempt to deter him only nestled her closer in his grasp as he rifled through the pack with his other hand and pulled out a small metal bottle with a crudely-fashioned cork top.

Again, she wished she could laugh, but the thick, dry panic in her throat stilled her tongue.

“Name’s Hedwyn,” he said, but the introduction did little to help the flutter of fear in her chest. She didn’t know him, couldn’t communicate with him, and had no means of running away - in short, completely at his mercy. The concept was terrifying, a severe contrast to the relative serenity of wasting away in the desert and dying alone. It didn’t help that his compatriot had so recently discussed ending her - so casually too, like pointing out a shape in a cloud.

Uncapping the container, he held it up to her face. Zaïre stared at him for a long moment before shaking her head weakly, pressing her lips together into a thin line of refusal.

“It’s water,” he assured, and she immediately grasped at the bottle and his hand with a greediness borne of desperation. Surprised at her sudden vigor, he let her pull the mouth of the bottle towards her face and watched her gulp for several long moments before pulling the canteen back.

As she tried to snatch the water from him, he gently batted her hand away, no malice in the gesture.

“Slow down,” he said. “You’ll vomit and be worse off if you drink too fast.”

Her sudden, silent glare startled a laugh from him. “Trust me, friend, you’ll thank me later.”

Zaïre doubted that, but the offering of water had calmed her nerves. She stilled her vague movements of struggle - as pitiful as they were, anyway - and merely watched him silently from half-narrowed eyes.

He poured a little more water from the liberated canteen on a rag - also from the sack at his side - and dabbed gently at the caked blood on her face. The split lip she endured from her fall was already starting to heal, but it couldn’t have been pretty - not that any part of her current state was especially appealing, for her or anyone else.

Struck by the absurdity of her situation and vaguely aware of the instability of her perception at present, Zaïre hesitantly reached up with her good arm to touch his face while he cleaned her own. It was halfway between rude and gentle: a quick jab at his cheek, followed by a soft press along his chin, which she found to be as mildly scratchy as his voice - he caught her wrist in confusion, and held her hand away from him. She let it drop back to her chest, satisfied that he was real and not just a last gasp of her dying mind; not just wishful thinking of a rescue or a quicker path to the end.

He felt real enough. He was either real or she was very, very close to death - perhaps both were true.

The man smiled again as he finished, put the rag away, then looked towards the wagon. “Do you think you can walk? We should get inside before the sun fully sets, and I should see about splinting that arm properly.”

At the mention of ‘walking’, Zaïre let her head roll back so she could eye the blackwagon from her sandbound position. She wasn’t sure she could even get up, and turned her head back to the stranger to - no, not stranger. Hedwyn. Still, in essence, a stranger, but providing aid and his name in these harsh times was a large enough gesture to build half of a bridge to friendship. At the very least, giving water to a dying woman was not the actions of someone who was planning on killing her.

After a beat, she shook her head to answer his question, but he wore a peculiar expression that gave her pause.

“Is that why you aren’t talking?” Ah. He brought the hand that wasn’t supporting her back up to her neck to inspect the scar he’d just spied there, but her own hand reflexively caught his wrist and he immediately stopped. Once she was sure he wasn’t going to try and touch it, she released his hand, pointed to her neck, and then pressed her fingertips to her closed lips and nodded her head in affirmation to his inquiry. The look that flitted over his face might have been pity, and she stared past his shoulder in an effort to ignore it. Yes, Zaïre was mute; she’d been so for a number of years, but she still was never quite used to those looks.

“Sorry,” he looked almost sheepish - as if he wasn’t sure what exactly he was sorry for - but quickly picked the half-empty canteen up and capped it, tucking it back in the bag and turning to her with a renewed smile, that look long gone.

“See, you’re tougher than you look. Come on, I’ll help you to the wagon.”

He then got to his feet, pulling her up with him. Zaïre leaned heavily on his side, unable to support herself in any approximation of ‘upright’. Hedwyn took the weight without complaint, then guided her forward.

The first step was difficult. The second, impossible. He seemed to realize that he would be dragging her the entire way and paused to reconsider.

“Apologies for the indignity,” he said, before he stooped and unceremoniously threw Zaïre’s torso over his shoulder like a sack of flour - like she weighed nothing, which… at this point, was closer to the truth than not. The sudden movement knocked the air out of her and kicked her stomach into nauseous protest, but she had no way to complain as he tucked his hands behind her knees and began the walk back to the others.

Thus she passed from the overbearing heat into the soothing shade of the blackwagon, and immediately blacked out.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: cue zaire seeing jodariel’s beautiful face in a bit when she wakes up and fainting all over again smh.


End file.
